Religious for Religious sake?

Zechariah 7 study: A Call to Justice and Mercy.

I was reading Zechariah today and I came across this passage. The people of God are in exile from their homeland, their promised land that God had blessed them with, and had lost favor with God because of their breaking the contract they made with God. They have a question for God.

“Should we continue to mourn and fast each summer on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, as we have done for so many years?”

In essence they are asking, God are you still mad at us, are you going to be mad forever because if so, we want to know if we need to continue on with all this religious stuff that seems to be giving us no progress in our life whatsoever. It all seems pointless God.

I know that I have been there. God, do I really need to (fill in the blank with spiritual exercise) is it going to get me anywhere, is it going to advance me in anything, will I make any progress? I love God’s answer. He seems to be able to see to the heart of human selfishness and call us on it.

“During these seventy years of exile, when you fasted and mourned in the summer and in early autumn, was it really for me that you were fasting? And even now in your holy festivals, aren’t you eating and drinking just to please yourselves?’”

I love how God answers questions with questions. God stares our selfishness in the face and says, “Are you serious? You really think this way?” We ask God, “What’s in it for me?” and God responds, “What if it’s not about you?” This response leaves us speechless. “But it has to be about me, what else is there?”

This leads me to a question that God is asking, “Are you religious for religious sake?” God has always asked one thing from His people and he restates it over and over in the Old Testament, and Jesus echoes it again and again in the New.

“This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies says: Judge fairly, and show mercy and kindness to one another. Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor. And do not scheme against each other.”

But it can’t be that easy, it can’t be all about that. It has to be some big complex religious theology that we must wrap our minds around. But the response of the Israelites is the same response we give today in most cases:

“Your ancestors refused to listen to this message. They stubbornly turned away and put their fingers in their ears to keep from hearing. They made their hearts as hard as stone, so they could not hear the instructions or the messages that the LORD of Heaven’s Armies had sent them by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. That is why the LORD of Heaven’s Armies was so angry with them. “Since they refused to listen when I called to them, I would not listen when they called to me, says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies. As with a whirlwind, I scattered them among the distant nations, where they lived as strangers. Their land became so desolate that no one even traveled through it. They turned their pleasant land into a desert.”

Our response is to keep on being religious for religious sake so that we do not have to confront our own selfishness and ugliness. We wish to take a mask and hide it from others and ourselves. But the truth is still there, we are selfish, we are sinful, we are ugly. The gospel is so transforming because God opens our eyes to our own ugliness and says, let’s heal this. Then we become conduits for that same transformation that God has brought in us!

We are a people who need to be born again and again and again… We need multiple conversions, not from a salvation standpoint but a refining one, because our sinfulness, and ugliness, and selfishness runs deep into our DNA and God takes us along a path called sanctification, a process of being made holy and like God. God is in constant refining mode on us.

When God transforms us we then become the people who fulfill His purpose, being a people who are concerned with bringing justice, mercy, and grace into a world that is in desperate need of it.

So, why are you religious?